The Shipkiller

by Justin Scott

  She accepted the few links she had to his life—the watch he had given her at Capetown, Donner, and even the cruel repeat of his own experience of loss. But she paid him homage with the little day sailer, practicing the skills he had taught her, taking pleasure in his pleasure.

  Now, in the fading light, she approached her dock under sail, the way he would have. A group of people watched her from the dimly lit parking lot. They were young professionals like herself, carrying sailbags and picnic baskets, chatting and laughing around their shiny cars, reluctant to let go the weekend. She pretended she didn’t notice their waves, hoping that they wouldn’t offer to help her dock and intrude on her private, special moment.

  Sailing under jib alone, she circled into the wind, taking off way, and wheeled the boat neatly beside the dock. She tied the stern line, then hurried forward to secure the bow. She was reaching toward the dock with a looped line when she heard him.

  “Nicely done.”

  Stunned, she looked up into his eyes. The wind filled the jib, pushing the bow away, and the distance between them began to increase. Ajaratu stared, her heart soaring.

  “Toss a line,” he grinned.

  She threw it automatically. He caught it and she held on to the mast as much to support herself as to brace against his pull while he hauled on the line and drew her to the dock. She wouldn’t have been the slightest surprised if his image had suddenly faded to nothing in the dusk.

  “If you cleat that line you can let go and kiss me hello.”

  The thought passed through her disbelieving mind that she had never seen him hold a smile so long.

  “Peter.”

  “I’m alive and well and I’d rather not stand around too long with those people watching us.” He said it still smiling, but he added, “Where I crossed the border they weren’t handing out visas.” His hair was long beneath a broad-brimmed campaign hat. He was bearded and a frayed khaki bush jacket hung loosely from his too-thin shoulders.

  “I’ll get you a visa,” she breathed.

  “I had a feeling you might— Now are you going to get off that little boat and kiss me hello?”

  “Peter! How did you get here?”

  He nodded toward a battered Land Rover parked beside the white 2000 she had had shipped from England. “Drove, part of the way. Do I have to get into that boat to kiss you hello?”

  The shock was more than she could handle so quickly and she said, her own voice coming to ears from a prim distance, “I have to unload my things.”

  He looked quizzical for a moment, then sat on the dock, his legs dangling over the water, and watched her bag her sails, coil her lines, gather her clothes and Thermos and lunch bag, and pile them on the dock. Ajaratu worked slowly, stealing glances at him, adjusting, wanting him to do nothing but sit there and watch her do the things she had done without him so he would know the life she had lived.

  She hosed the salt from the decks and by the time she had bailed and sponged the bilge it was dark. The people in the parking lot cast curious looks their way. Finally they drove off, and when they had he relaxed visibly and from that moment on never took his eyes off her.

  She looked around for little things to do, did them, then started to climb onto the dock. Suddenly he was reaching for her and taking her hand and pulling her up and into his arms. Their mouths joined, warm and liquid, and she trembled into joyous tears.

  Her apartment seemed very spartan to her. For the first time she regretted not doing anything with it.

  “I’ve seen steamer-trunk coffee tables,” he joked, sounding as nervous as she felt, “but never the suitcase kind.”

  “I’m moving to Ibadan.”

  “Back to school?”

  “Yes. But it’s a secret.”

  “From whom?”

  “My father wants me to marry. I’ll tell him after I’ve begun.”

  “What about your boat?”

  “I’ll drive down now and then on weekends,” she said, distractedly turning on lights, feeling his eyes as she moved around the room.

  “Ajaratu.”

  She stopped, and returned his gaze. He looked more tired than she had realized at first. He called her name again. His voice, like his eyes, seemed filled with her, even though he lingered tentatively by the door as if unsure what part of their strange life together they could resume.

  Holding his gaze, Ajaratu reached for him, loving the awkward way he took off his hat. “Your hair is so long,” she marveled. She touched it and her hand drifted to his face. “And your beard. You’re as shaggy as a lion.”

  “Funny you should say lion,” he grinned, stroking the beard. His fingernails were still meticulously cared for. “I met one in Ethiopia who offered to trim it for me at the neck.”

  “Your beard is so gray. . . . I like it.”

  His lips closed over her fingers. His tongue seared her skin. She looked into his eyes, saw confusion, and wrapped her long arms around him.

  “I’m so happy you came to me—don’t talk!”

  She kissed his mouth and pushed against his musculated body. He tried to speak anyway, but she covered his lips with her fingers again. He began to touch her in ways she remembered, molding and stirring her until she was shaking with desire, burning for him. She felt him grow against her. His hands were too slow. She helped him with her clothes, tore at his.

  She was astonished by how thin he was, and shocked by his scars. “Aren’t you forgetting something?” he murmured, nuzzling her breasts, caressing her bottom; his voice was light with a gentle joke and he seemed unaware she had noticed his maimed skin. “I’m here. Where’s my watch?”

  Holding him tightly, she backed across the room, led him to her bed, and shyly lifted the pillow. “I wore it on my wrist, at first. I had the band made smaller. I kept the links until Miles . . . told me you had died.”

  Hardin grinned, clearly enjoying himself. “You know how Miles exaggerates.”

  Ajaratu wanted to explain. “It was too heavy a watch to wear at the clinic, so I kept it here—I can read the dial easily when I wake up at night.”

  She closed her eyes as he gently stroked her face. As from a distance, she heard him say, “This is a very narrow bed.”

  “It was all I needed.”

  His fingers felt like the sun on her cheeks.

  Later, she lay warm on her side, a knee luxuriously up, her head on his chest, listening to his heart beat. Her eyes drifted lazily down his body. His square frame seemed smaller; his muscles were thin and stretched tightly over his bones. An angry red streak furrowed his right forearm and thin white scars striated his sun-blackened legs.

  She said, “It’s strange to make love and not be on the boat.”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you miss the motion?”

  “No.”

  “Neither did I. . . . But what a feeling it was the way she drove! . . . Did it hurt terribly to lose her?”

  “She was quite a boat.”

  “She was . . .” She smiled. “Well I certainly didn’t miss sail changes in the middle.”

  “Umm.”

  She felt Harding drift away from her. “Peter?”

  “Yes.”

  “What happened to your legs?”

  “Barnacles. I was hanging on to a dhow’s rudder.”

  She looked up at his face. He was staring at the ceiling. “They were like round razors.”

  “And your arm?” Ajaratu asked.

  He had described the barnacles unemotionally—a simple point of interest—but now his voice turned bitter. “A bullet . . . It wrecked the sights. I couldn’t control the rocket.”

  Her heart sinking, she listened to his breath quicken and felt his muscles grow tense against her cheek. She caressed him soothingly, but his body grew tighter.

  “You haven’t given it up. Have you?”

  “No.”

  “Why did you come to me?”

  “I need you.”

  “For that?”

  “For
everything.”

  “Including that?”

  “Including that.”

  Ajaratu curled into a tight ball, her head still on his chest. He has to do it, she thought hopelessly. Carolyn still boils in his mind. The passion is still his master, still my rival, and will be until he kills the ghost.

  31

  It was Saturday and the yacht-basin parking lot was crowded with brightly polished cars. Most of the slips were empty, but Ajaratu Akanke’s day sailer was still tied to the dock, partly filled with rainwater.

  Miles Donner had already been to her apartment; the doormen hadn’t seen her in several days. He’d gone back and broken in for a closer look. Her furniture was there, but her clothes closets and bookshelves were empty.

  The people at her clinic had said she had vacation time due and had suddenly taken it. Her father hadn’t seen her in several weeks, but that wasn’t unusual.

  Donner gazed into the rainwater in the bottom of her boat. He was worried, but it was excitement that tingled in his veins. By the time he reached Lagos’s Murtala Muhammed Airport it was spearing his stomach and racing in his brain. There was no point in trying to make contact with the Mossad in Lagos. He had to go home to try to make them listen.

  32

  Captain Ogilvy stood between Miles Donner and James Bruce on LEVIATHAN’s port wing. The giant ship was steaming down the west coast of Africa, empty, beginning its third voyage since Hardin had attacked in the Persian Gulf seven months before. It was alone on the sea save for an old three-island freighter, plodding the Senegal coast miles to the east, whose tops reflected the setting sun.

  Ogilvy was angry. Donner was worried. They had been arguing, oblivious to Bruce’s attempts to mediate, since the Israeli and the company staff captain had joined the ship when LEVIATHAN passed Cape Verde. Binoculars hung from each man’s neck. Donner used his to scan the water every few minutes.

  “Dammit, man!” snapped Ogilvy. “You know bloody well Hardin’s dead.”

  “Then where’s his body?” Donner asked quietly.

  “Ask LEVIATHAN’s propellers.”

  “But we found pieces of the rubber boat.”

  “The Iranians made a balls-up of the search,” Ogilvy shot back. “Royal Navy could teach the wogs a thing or two about seamanship, eh Bruce?”

  Bruce smiled wanly. “Let’s call up the helicopter, Cedric. He’ll be here in two hours and we’ll all feel better with a little firepower. Why don’t—”

  Ogilvy cut him off. “Or they found him alive and bashed him about so badly they couldn’t show the body. The Iranians are torturers, for God’s sake. Or didn’t you notice when you were buzzing around on their Hovercraft? Maybe they just let him drown. They as much as told me they’d deal with the damned fool before the American State Department could intervene.”

  “I never heard anything like that,” said Bruce.

  “They’d hardly send you a memorandum. The point is he’s dead.”

  Donner asked, “How can you be so sure he’s not alive and hunting right now? ”

  “Because he’s dead.”

  “But I’ve told you that the woman is missing.”

  “People disappear all the time. Even in civilized places.”

  “Civilized?” Donner asked incredulously. “She’s a physician in the capital city of the most advanced black nation in the world.”

  “I don’t give a damn if she was performing surgery on the king of Zululand. Hardin is dead.”

  “And will you also ignore the fact that a Nautor Swan was stolen in the Gulf of Guinea near Nigeria?”

  “Along with two dozen other expensive yachts. They’ve more pirates in the Niger delta than they ever had in the China Sea.”

  “But it’s his kind of boat.”

  “Would you steal a tatty little dinghy if you could have one of them?”

  “Do you want him to sink you?”

  “Absurd coincidences will not sink LEVIATHAN.”

  “But there are too many coincidences,” said Donner. “And not all absurd. His kind of boat stolen. His body never found. His woman missing.”

  “Political intrigue,” retorted Ogilvy.

  “She had no politics.”

  “Then she ran off with a lover.”

  “She lived alone. She had no lovers.”

  “A young woman like that alone? Nonsense.”

  “Ajaratu Akanke loved Hardin in a way you or I could never know. She was as determined to have him as he was to sink this ship.”

  “‘Was’ is precisely the word. He’s dead.”

  “But if he is not, we must allow for the admittedly remote possibility that they’ve stolen another weapon and—”

  “Poppycock!”

  “Captain, I’m not the only one who thinks you need protection. Your company does and so does Lloyd’s of London, your insurer.

  “You’re heaping coincidence upon impossibility.”

  “It’s just possible he could have swum to a sea rig,” Bruce suggested tentatively. “There were quite a few within a mile.”

  “Not ruddy likely!”

  “But what if he did?” asked Donner. “And later managed to board a dhow. They’re everywhere on the Gulf. The monsoon was about to turn. A dhow could have taken him all the way to east Africa.”

  “Impossible!” Ogilvy shouted. His mouth hardened like a beak and his fingers began to drift up and down his leather binoculars strap. “Hardin’s dead. Didn’t you see the serpents in the Gulf?”

  “How many serpents would have stayed around while your convoy was riling the water?”

  “It would only take one to kill him.” He turned angrily on the staff captain. “I’ll be damned if LEVIATHAN will carry an armed helicopter for you or the company or even Lloyd’s just because one black girl didn’t come home on time!”

  He stared Bruce down.

  Donner scanned the horizon with his binoculars.

  The sun, a precise red ball low in a cloudless sky, shot a clean red line across the darkening sea into LEVIATHAN’s hull. The warm tropical breeze ruffled Ogilvy’s thick white hair. He polished the captain’s insignia on his left shoulder, glanced back, and inspected the result.

  The wing telephone clamored. He picked it up, then handed it to Donner, who had received several radiotelephone calls since he had boarded. The Israeli moved as far aside as the cord would allow and listened, his eyes on the sea.

  Ogilvy watched for a moment, then turned to James Bruce. “I can’t for the life of me remember,” he said casually. “Were you aboard one of the convoy vessels that night?”

  “No. I was waiting on Wellhead One.”

  “Oh yes. Silly of me. . . . Well, you missed something, I must say. I was right here on the port wing, of course, with a weather eye on the wog escort. It was a marvelous sight, Bruce. The sort of thing a man your age has never seen, having missed the war. Utterly majestic. You knew that they laid on a frigate for LEVIATHAN?”

  Bruce nodded. He’d heard Ogilvy’s story many times.

  “And air cover that would have done the RAF proud. You have to hand it to the Iranians. They mustered a very decent force. And in quick time, once I got them sorted out.”

  “It was quite a night,” Bruce agreed.

  “You really ought to get off at Monrovia.”

  “I know, Cedric. It sounds farfetched, but Donner brought pressure—”

  “Don’t worry,” Ogilvy interrupted quietly. “I’m going to sort your Mr. Donner out right now.”

  Donner cradled the phone, a worried smile playing on his lips. He looked older than when Bruce had met him in the Gulf, and the ease of his manner seemed diminished by a small but telling fraction. “Captain,” he said imploringly, “they tell me she is still missing. Again, I ask you, please consider the remote, but potentially castastrophic, possibility that Hardin is alive and hunting LEVIATHAN.”

  “Agreed,” said James Bruce, mustering his courage. This had gone far enough. He had a responsibility to the compa
ny and the ship, as well as the crew. Ogilvy was playing with their lives.

  “Cedric, I’m afraid I’m going to have to insist this time. Please have your radio officer call the helicopter.”

  To his relief, Ogilvy displayed none of the usual signs of impending explosion, and when he replied, it was so calmly that Bruce missed for a second the fact that he was ignoring him and addressing Donner.

  “As I understand it, you work for the government of Israel?”

  “Yes,” said Donner, facing the captain with a wary eye.

  “And their intelligence apparatus discovered Hardin’s plan last summer.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you were asked to bear this information to LEVIATHAN’s owners.”

  “That’s essentially correct, sir.”

  “And to the Saudis and the Iranians?”

  “To whomever it concerned.”

  “Did you know Hardin?”

  Donner returned Ogilvy’s gaze unblinkingly. “No.”

  “And what has happened since then?”

  “Just as I told you. We assumed that Hardin was dead, until we recently learned that Dr. Akanke had disappeared—”

  “No. I mean what have you been doing?”

  Donner looked uncomfortable. “A number of things have—”

  “You’ve retired,” Ogilvy said bluntly.

  “Does it show?”

  “It shows.” Ogilvy smiled. “Not a lot, but at my age I can’t help noticing such things. Have you a hobby?”

  “I take photographs.”

  Bruce waited patiently. He saw the drift of what Ogilvy was doing. Let him vent his anger, first.

  “But wouldn’t you rather return to your government work?” Ogilvy persisted.

  Donner nodded almost imperceptibly as he said, “It’s not a choice open to me.”

  Ogilvy smiled again. “Well, not until recently.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Donner.

  “You’ve stirred everyone up about Hardin again. And here you are, back at your old job.” He chuckled. “And what is that job?” He echoed his own words mockingly. “Your ‘government work’? You and your sources and information and radio messages and contacts at Lloyd’s—you’re some sort of ruddy spy. A washed-up, ruddy spy, to be more precise. Don’t you see what he’s doing, Bruce? He’s redundant.”